ing only with incoherent sentences.

It was of course different in a town like this from elsewhere. In
these long-settled regions, where the soil had assumed its irrevocable
configuration hundreds and hundreds of years ago and where volcanic
manifestations were not even contemplated as possible, any phenomenon
of the kind was peculiarly alarming, illogical, abnormal, and in
violent contradiction with the laws of nature and with those
conditions of security which each of us has the right to regard as
unchanging and as definitely fixed by destiny.

And Simon, who since the previous day had been wandering to and fro in
this atmosphere of distraction, Simon, who remembered Old Sandstone's
unfinished predictions and who had seen the gigantic waterspout in
which the _Queen Mary_ was swallowed up, Simon asked himself:

"What is happening? What is going to happen? In what unforeseen
fashion and by what formidable enemy will the coming attack be
delivered?"

Though he had meant to leave Dieppe on that night or the following
morning, he felt that his departure would be tantamount to a desertion
just when his father was returning and when so many symptoms announced
the imminence of a final catastrophe.

"Isabel will advise me," he said to himself. "We will decide together
what we have to do."

Meantime night had fallen. He returned to the hotel at nine o'clock
and asked that Isabel should be told. He was amazed, almost stunned by
the news that Miss Bakefield had gone. She had come down from her room
an hour earlier, had handed in at the office a letter addressed to
Simon Dubosc and had suddenly left the hotel.

Disconcerted, Simon asked for explanations. There seemed to be none to
give, except that one of the waiters said that the young lady had
joined a sailor who seemed to be waiting for her in the street and
that they had gone off together.

Taking the letter, Simon moved away with the intention of going to a
cafe or entering the hotel, but he had not the courage to wait and it
was by the light of a street lamp that he opened the envelope and
read:

"I am writing to you with absolute confidence, feeling
happy in the certainty that everything I say will be
understood and that you will feel neither bitterness
nor resentment, nor, after the first painful shock,
any real distress.

"Simon, we have made a mistake. It is right that our
love, the great and sincere love which we b